Randy Cassingham has been sending his email newsletter, This is True, for 14 years. On August 1, 2008, he reported that Yahoo started to block his email. Turns out a lot of his subscribers who opted in to get his emails clicked Yahoo's "This is Spam" button instead of the simple unsubscribe option at the bottom of his newsletter.

Cassingham's story isn't unique. As the email service provider for thousands of organizations, once in a while we see a case where all of our clients' Yahoo (or AOL etc.) deliveries go through without a hitch except for one. When we investigate, we almost always find that the block is on that particular sender or is related to some content within that sender's message. All the while no other clients are affected.

Like some of our more reputable competitors, we are whitelisted with all of the major ISPs and then some. Yet ISPs reserve the right to block an individual email if they deem it to be spam. The way they make their decision is based on two things: 1) bounces and 2) spam complaints.

Cassingham uses a software program, not a service like MailerMailer, to send his newsletter and has his own IP addresses. This means he has to manage ISP relationships on his own, in addition to writing his newsletter. Services like ours manage these relationships for you, taking a lot of the headache out of email list management.

Since Yahoo's block affected more than 15% of his list, Cassingham's email newsletter ad revenue would be directly affected. So, he started a campaign. He blogged about Yahoo's actions and asked his subscribers to get involved. They did. As word spread, very quickly I might add, popular techie site Slashdot and others reported stories about Yahoo's actions.

Yesterday evening (August 5), Yahoo contacted him with a short note: "Your IP [address] should have no issues delivering now."

Would his emails still be blocked if his subscribers and others hadn't complained big time to Yahoo? Probably. ISPs listen to their customers, which are the email recipients not the senders.

If you encounter a deliverability issue, get your subscribers to complain directly to the ISP. They'll be heard more loudly and more clearly than anything you could do on your own - of course, having an email service provider like MailerMailer on your side can improve your odds dramatically.

Comments

Anima_Sola

AT&T is blocking my legitimate emails. I use email for my livelihood. I’ve been through their postmaster, and two lines of support. The advanced support tech said that even his group cannot communicate with a human person at their postmaster level. I emailed the postmaster a week ago. Zilch. Zip. Nada.

Ariane, excellent point about DKIM to help get Yahoo mail through. Feedback loops are, however, available so you can find out who is clicking their “This is Spam” button instantly. We at MailerMailer have it set up and fully integrated for all of our clients to see (we have this for all of the major ISPs who offer it, including Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, etc.).

We do sometimes see people use that button as a way to just delete messages instead of the real “Delete” button. We even had a call from a customer once whose sister filed a complaint instead of deleting her brother’s company’s message. All records that we got from the ISP showed the exact date/time etc. that she clicked on the “This is Spam” button.

Everyone is having huge difficulty delivering emails to Yahoo. If you Google it you’ll see countless complaints along the same lines. We’ve opened numerous support requests over the past months for assistance from Yahoo and we basically get the same canned form response and not much else.

Yahoo has developed their own anti-spam mechanism called ‘domain keys’ and we’re putting together a KB article for clients on how to implement it. Think of it as basically caller-ID for email. Yahoo has suggested that this will help with the issue, but it seems to me they’re sort of forcing everyone to use it or have their email rejected. We’re in the final stages of writing the article and should have it available hopefully tomorrow. I don’t know that it’ll 100% resolve this on-going issue, but hopefully it’ll reduce it.

December 10th, 2008 at 4:15 pm

Wally

Starting two days ago all my emails to yahoo mail addresses were blocked and I got a message saying the messages were ‘deferred’ and that I am not to resend but yahoo would try to complete over the next 5 days. I get the message 4 hours after sending an email saying that they have tried to complete it for 4 hours. I rely on email for my business and all my emails were replies to requests via my website for more information. If only all these people knew that I was trying to respond but their provider was blocking me!

April 14th, 2009 at 3:08 pm

Razvan

@Paul: having the same issues with Yahoo on a legitimate 80k+ list of emails, we implemented both DKIM and DomainKeys and still our messages are marked as spam by Yahoo…

February 8th, 2010 at 3:53 pm

shirley smith

From Outlook Express I can no longer send emails to a Yahoo address, I can receive but not send, this has just happened. Please help me.

Shirley, this is unlikely due to Outlook Express. Yahoo and other providers don’t block based on the email program you used. They block based on the content sent and the complaints that were previously generated. I would suggest that you contact Yahoo’s postmaster group to find out the details. They may take a while to respond since they are usually inundated with requests. Another option is to explore using an Email Service Provider (like MailerMailer. We maintain whitelisting agreements with major ISPs to get better deliverability. That said, we are also very careful about the lists that we allow into our system so we run a lot of checks before accepting clients.)

I know this is an old thread, but the problem hasn’t gone away. I know many of you don’t have this luxury, but I just run a tiny mailing list for a non-profit professional organization. I’ve just told subscribers I can’t send email to Yahoo and if they want to sign up, they have to use a non-Yahoo account.